New Products

The UK's Introversion Software was proud to tell us that it is
“keen supporters of the Linux community” and, therefore, is releasing
its third and latest Linux-based game, DEFCON.
DEFCON is an on-line,
competitive, multiplayer strategy game based around the theme of global
thermonuclear war. Inspired by the 1983 cult-classic
Wargames, the game
“evokes the tension, paranoia and suspicion surrounding the Cold
War era”.
The player assumes the role of a general hidden in an underground bunker,
whose mission is to exterminate the enemy's civilian population while
simultaneously disabling the enemy's ability to retaliate. PC
Gamer UK
described DEFCON as “pure, deep, utterly
unconscionable fun”. A Windows
version is already available. Introversion should get an award for best
URL to boot!

Ever feel like voting your conscience by supporting the Penguin Party rather
than settling for the lesser of two “Republicrat” or
“Demopublican” evils?
To solve this dilemma, alternative (and Constitutional and increasingly
popular) voting methods, such as single transferable vote (STV) and
instant runoff voting have evolved that allow one to rank candidates
in an election. If your Penguin Party candidate has no chance in hell
to win, your vote counts instead for your lower-ranked choice who has
a shot at winning. Sorting out these voting preferences is the job of
OpenSTV, now in version 1.1, an open-source application that tabulates
votes according to the respective voting rules. Data generally comes
from from paper ballots and is dumped into OpenSTV. The lead developer
says that “some of the voting rules have been extensively verified by
comparing the results over hundreds of elections against other
software”.
OpenSTV runs on Linux, Mac OS X or Windows and can be downloaded from
SourceForge.

The company you've known as Etnus has rechristened itself as TotalView
Technologies, and to celebrate, it has released version 2.0 of its
MemoryScape standalone interactive memory debugger. MemoryScape “helps
developers identify, inspect and resolve difficult memory problems in
C, C++ and FORTRAN, including complex multiprocess and multithreaded
programs”, says TotalView. Some key features include tools that allow
developers “to monitor heap memory, view memory usage, locate memory
leaks, track memory events and show corrupted memory”. Developers also
can save and compare memory states, compile memory reports and find memory
problems without recompiling. New features in MemoryScape 2.0 include
support for MPI programs and remote memory debugging. A trial version is
available for download from TotalView's Web site.

Woven Systems has put more than a beach bucket's worth of VC money
into its new switch product, the EFX-1000. The end result,
says Woven, is the first of a new class of Ethernet Fabric Switches,
intended to meet the needs that accompany multicore servers, server
consolidation and virtualization, IP storage and data center grids.
Ethernet Fabric Switches can be interconnected to build “resilient,
low-latency, non-blocking meshed Layer 2 fabrics scaling to more than 4,000
10GbE ports”. The 10GbE EFX-1000 switch “incorporates the performance
and low cost of InfiniBand, the reliability of Fibre Channel, and the
plug-and-play interoperability of Ethernet”, all at a significantly
reduced per-port price. Woven Systems has been dubbed one of the “Top
10 Startups to Watch” by the publication Byte and
Switch due to its
“potentially disruptive data center technology”, as well as
“Cool Vendor”
by the Gartner Group.

Xandros' new Server 2.0 just hit the streets and contains
new features like integrated OpenDocument collaboration and comprehensive
server backup and restore. The OpenDocument collaboration extension,
created in tandem with the firm O3Spaces B.V., “provides OpenDocument
and MS-Office document collaboration, management and retention
services”
and serves as an alternative to the Microsoft Office SharePoint server.
For server backup and restore, Xandros has integrated SEP AG's “SEP
sesam application, which provides comprehensive data security for the
Xandros Linux Server, including full integration with its new Scalix 11
collaboration platform”.

As Linux continues to play an ever increasing role in corporate data centers and institutions, ensuring the integrity and protection of these systems must be a priority. With 60% of the world's websites and an increasing share of organization's mission-critical workloads running on Linux, failing to stop malware and other advanced threats on Linux can increasingly impact an organization's reputation and bottom line.

Most companies incorporate backup procedures for critical data, which can be restored quickly if a loss occurs. However, fewer companies are prepared for catastrophic system failures, in which they lose all data, the entire operating system, applications, settings, patches and more, reducing their system(s) to “bare metal.” After all, before data can be restored to a system, there must be a system to restore it to.

In this one hour webinar, learn how to enhance your existing backup strategies for better disaster recovery preparedness using Storix System Backup Administrator (SBAdmin), a highly flexible bare-metal recovery solution for UNIX and Linux systems.